Give.org says Watsi did not want to be evaluated by the BBB's standards for charity accountability[0]. I never donate to anyone without good numbers on Give.org and I recommend everyone check out Give.org when considering donating to any charity.
> This charitable organization either has not responded to written BBB requests for information or has declined to be evaluated in relation to BBB Standards for Charity Accountability.
Hard to read anything into this, tbh. BBB isn't exactly the most meaningful signal in the first place and it's hard to blame organizations for not playing along.
We're getting such powerful models we'll likely be able to replace all of Google soon.
- Google Docs suite - easy, probably requires less than $10M to duplicate the entire set of functionality, including all the enterprise and reporting features
- Gmail - same
- Google Search (classic, not LLM-answers) - probably easy to do now, the challenge is getting past Cloudflare
- Android - vibe coded hardware is coming, but we're probably 5ish years out.
- YouTube - probably one of the hardest, due to network effects / distribution
- GCP - hardest, due to the infra build out. But neoclouds are rapidly growing.
I can't think of anything most big tech companies do that won't be put under threat in the era of personal software and rapid development.
It's ironic that Google invented the transformer and it seems likely that it will undo the empire they've built as well as all of the moats in the world that aren't distribution / community based.
Yesterday I tried to google "can the Halifax Wanderers still make the CPL playoffs?"
So obviously what appears right at the top is the AI summary, which told me "they've already secured their #4 position and made the playoffs". I knew this wasn't true, and I guess I could have just scrolled down a bit further and found my answer but now I was curious.
So I said "that's not true, they're still #5, what I want to know is _could they still make the playoffs_"
It says they've got an upcoming game against Ottawa, and if they win their chances are good. That game has already taken place, so I correct it again and finally I get a reasonable answer.
My question is: what's the point of the AI in the search engine if it itself isn't going to use the search engine first before answering? Like, I can't wrap my head around that. The answer is on the same page as its hallucination. It could have done a cursory look around before first hallucinating something completely false, and when corrected the first time giving me outdated information. It's meant to be A SEARCH ENGINE!
How did you google this, and did you use the dumb search, or specifically 'AI mode' lens?
Because I did this and got a vastly different result from you:
Yes, the Halifax Wanderers can still mathematically qualify for the 2026 Canadian Premier League (CPL) playoffs.The top four teams advance to the postseason. Following their 1-0 loss to Atlético Ottawa on September 26, 2026, the Wanderers sit in fifth place, just below the playoff line.
With a indexed table of the games and the playoff table, with a breakdown of what the points they need to achieve to do so.
The search window may not always crawl sources. AI mode specifically does some research before giving you a response. Not sure what you're on about.
I similarly noticed Gemini absolutely refuses to look at a url when I give it one and will instead just hallucinate based on what it thinks the url is. Here I am assuming Google will have the best web capabilities in its AI.
I searched for something, it told me that according to a YouTube video, the entire point of my search was wrong. I asked it for the source, I watched the video, it never made the claims Gemini hallucinated. I asked again and it claimed it scrubbed the video and found the point it made multiple times. I said those timecodes were wrong and it admitted it couldn't actually parse videos and just guessed.
I don't understand how this isn't considered as active malice. Like purposefully outputting random stuff. Any other sort of computer system would get lot more flak than these are getting.
I still believe this AI push out of nowhere is due to the current Government in power state side. Making everyone question themselves and each other and being uncertain about facts while being inundated with techbro fake news called hallucinations is a recipe for disaster for older populations that don't 'trust but verify' like most technology inclined people. This is all by design and we'll falling for it.
Same experience with the interaction I described in my comment... after I finally got the correct answer, I asked where it got the faulty information from. It said it had just simply fabricated it. That's actively worse than just saying "I don't know", for something that's sold to us as an easy way to look up information.
Claude also has very arbitrary and confusing rules about what web pages it allows itself to look at, and how much of the page it can read. Did you know for example you’ll get a much deeper analysis if you download a PDF yourself and upload it to Claude instead of giving it the url?
This is a key reason why I actually like Grok for factual queries based on web grounding. It’s fast and reliable. Maybe it’s ignoring robots.txt? Dunno. But it works well.
I'm being very mindful of Gell-Mann Amnesia and chatbots. They speak authoritatively and are right often enough, but I've had enough cases of them saying very incorrect things in areas I know well that I have to remind myself that those cases aren't unique.
Like it or not, this is exactly what normies have always wanted out of search engines - a little guy in their computer they can talk to for answers, advice and reassurance. They've always been trying to use Google Search this way and have been confused and annoyed that it doesn't work. And now it does! It's a massive quality of life improvement for the average user and a huge product win for Google.
No, we did not want it to offer weirdly irrelevant fake sympathy. We just wanted to talk in plain English and get relevant answers back in plain English. That is not what happened in TFA.
I'm not sure about this. I know complete normies that lament how bad Google is now and how often the search is useless. I think many people just want search to search.
So if enough 737's crash into the water Boeing will start making submarines? Product managers deserve a special express queue when in line for the Warm Place.
Yeah - exactly this. And yet people still say they've lost the AI race because Gemini 3.5 Pro or whatever has not been released yet... And here we are with fast and decent AI being served to and used by billions of people (most without them probably even realising), making ever-increasing revenue, gaining back market share etc. Who cares if their coding models are not as good as opus 5.5 when they're printing more and more money every quarter.
This is not a “gotcha” kind of argumentative question, I am genuinely asking curiously: is the AI overview and AI lens thing really making Google lots of money?
The debate doesn't end there yet because what's considered a "scam" is a point on the gradient of user acceptance.
Too many users still reject this for it to not be a scam. The highest acceptance is from boomers and the delusional. Neither group gives a shit if AI actually works because they don't have work to do.
Most people in the world are profoundly lonely. They'll take whatever parasocial relationships they can get - reaction videos, podcasts of people chatting, Eliza simulating concern.
Google wants to relentlessly monetise your sadness.
The only way out is to try and make connections with real people.
Case in point, why didn't you text your friends to ask them if they remembered those old memes? Why was your first thought to ask a computer rather than a person?
It's like when you're in the pub and and someone asks "who was that guy who was in the movie where…?" you can either chat with your friends and have a good time or be a buzzkill who opens up IMDB and says "Humphrey Bogart".
Texting your friends for factual information doesn't seem reasonable to me. If I got that text and someone only wanted the info I'd be annoyed (and I had friends who genuinely did this pre-google. Still annoying).
Irrelevant nitpick, but it's definitely not "most". I'd argue it's only this common in some English speaking countries and maybe a few other Western ones.
The looks I get from American friends when I tell them that yes I do see my (local) friends nearly every day, are quite funny.
> The looks I get from American friends when I tell them that yes I do see my (local) friends nearly every day, are quite funny.
How old are you, though, and do you and/or your friends have kids?
When I (an American) was in my 30s, I did see my local friends (nearly) every day. Now into my mid 40s, it's a lot more intermittent, with some people having moved away (and I've failed to make new friends faster than some have moved away). They are still friends, and we communicate over chat/phone, but I only see them at most a couple times a year. Then there are others who now have young children and have become a bit more inward-focused. Not that I don't see them anymore, but I see them less often.
I of course see others on a daily basis: people I know/recognize at my yoga studio, service workers in my neighborhood, the neighbors themselves, but most of them are acquaintances, at best, not friends.
Regardless, I wouldn't say I'm lonely (though I do feel lonely on occasion), even though I can sometimes go a week or more without seeing any of my friends in person. I do worry about it being more difficult to maintain in-person friendships as I've been getting older, and the difficulty in making new friends.
To relate to the topic at hand: I cannot imagine talking to an LLM and thinking of that as a substitute for interacting with friends. Feels super weird and kinda creepy.
I've been doing a lot of traveling for the past 3 years and I agree with you that it is `definitely not "most"`. Everywhere people interacting with each other in third spaces and cafes even if it is street food. There are open air markets around the world filled everyday with groups of people interacting with each other. There are parks and squares around the world filled with families sitting together on benches. Around the world there are churches, mosques, and temples filled with families and groups of people.
Most places in the world people will happily make small talk or have a discussion with a stranger even if I only know 100 words of their language.
Sure many or most people in some places are working 10 hours a day 6 days a week but I don't think it is the isolation I see in the United States. It is the same in De'Nang Vietnam or a market in Lima, Peru when I went everyday to get coffee in the morning; it was always the same person working ,any time or day of the week, but they were always friendly and welcoming and interacting with with the same people.
Travel alone in America and the frequency with which strangers will engage you in conversation reveals its diversity. New York and Atlanta are, today, exceptionally friendly. Most of the South is, too, as well as a surmising fraction of rural America. (Boston and Seattle are, in my experience, the worst.)
>It's like when you're in the pub and and someone asks "who was that guy who was in the movie where…?" you can either chat with your friends and have a good time or be a buzzkill who opens up IMDB and says "Humphrey Bogart".
I don’t really understand this. Someone wants an answer not a chat about how you don’t know?
The primary purpose of going out with your friends to the pub is social interaction. If the purpose was just to get drunk most efficiently, you'd sit at home alone and pour vodka down your gaping maw.
The purpose of talking to your friends is social interaction. If the purpose of being friends was to extract information in the most efficient manner possible, you'd replace them with Wikipedia.
If in some social interaction they ask such question I expect them to actually want to know the answer. If not the question should not be asked. The answer to question can lead discussion to some place.
The part I hate the most is they got rid of the dictionary/thesaurus/etymology thing and replaced it with AI overview. Now "define <word>" or "<word> synonyms" gives you an AI overview with consistently worse output than the nice, consistent and deterministic dictionary output.
God, grant me the serenity to read the AI summary when it contains true information, the courage to ignore it when it contains falsehoods, and the wisdom to know the difference.
Even ignoring the AI, I hate how useless exact text search has become. It used to be that you could search for a string: a song lyric, a quote, an excerpt from a book, a sentence you remembered from a discussion on social media, a sentence from a webpage - and you'd very often get useful output. Now I usually get garbage or nothing at all.
I don’t understand how we’re 60 comments in and yet no-one has suggested that the problem is that you’re continuing to use Google despite it changing its core offering out from underneath your feet. If you want search (which isn’t an unreasonable desire) then Google isn’t the place for you any more.
There was a post today or yesterday where Paul Graham and Nate Silver accused the AP of being woke for saying you shouldn’t anthropomorphize LLMs. But I can imagine there to be quite a few unpredictable consequences to encouraging your customers to project emotions onto your product that humans generally project onto each other.
I’m not sure SV is prepared for what happens when you go down that road.
I had a similar experience with this that actually concerned me. I can’t remember the quote I was googling, but it was verbatim a quote that someone said. The AI interpreted it as my quote and furthermore interpreted it as me intending harm to someone else. Now I’m worried I’m flagged in a system and waiting for the police to show at my door next time google hands over data to the government.
As someone who loves (loved) to google movie, TV and anime quotes all the time, it is nauseating when stupid AI preview tries to engage me in a conversation.
Haha, had almost the exact thing trying to find a quote from Steins; Gate ("I keep seeing it, I keep seeing it"). Google AI was very "worried" about me.
A key thing that's driving this is the fact that, currently, Gemini is kind of shit compared to the real frontier models from OpenAI and Anthropic. Add on to that the need for Google to serve an absolute insane number of these summaries and have low latency for each one - this means no real thinking time and a comparatively small models.
So it's partially AI, sure, but it's also because you're getting the summaries from what is an extremely stupid AI compared to the "good stuff" that's out there.
the internet devolves into a machine to capture human attention and monetize influence. Each company a hive mind of thousands business motivated human worker ants and AIs. The machine has determined that this pyscho-babble is the most optimal way to engage the attention of average humans to maximize its own reward function ($$$)
As a heavy user of LLMs professionally, I too am so confused by the decision making process within these orgs. Do people really want them to speak like actual human connections? Why?
Yeah, this is exactly what happens when a business operates from the standpoint of "how can we shove AI into this", rather than "what will be the best way to make our product better". So it is with almost all companies forcing LLMs into their products.
The difference is that most chatbots are not actually highly successful search engines that are also being a chatbot and pretending it's the same thing
The software industry collectively lost the plot back around the time social media really took off. I don't know which problem google, in particular, has been trying to solve but it definitely is not search.
Yeah, it happened to me a number of times on queries where I was clearly looking for information, not company. Even more bizarrely, it's often compelled to answer with some flavor of "I won't answer". For example:
I know their goal is to make these as relevant and useful as possible, but in my mind, not everything needs to be passed down to an LLM. I guess Google disagrees.
You look at me, you've got nothing left to say
I moan and pout at you until I get my way
I won't dance, you won't sing
I just wanna love you, but you wanna wear my ring
Well, there's nothing I can do
I only wanna be with you
You can call me your fool
I only wanna be with you
Maybe I'm in the minority, but I often use Google when I have some text I got from somewhere, and want to find pages containing that exact text. Sometimes the text in question sounds like something you'd say to someone else and, of course, the AI overview responds to it accordingly.
To me, there's something deeply unsettling about this... thing pretending to be a person, shoving itself in my face and responding to this random text as if it was a person responding to something I said to it, without my consent. I can't disable it, I'm just forced to have this fake human sitting there, listening in on everything I type into the search box and trying to talk to me about it. It's a sort of uncanny valley-like feeling.
Google has been really bad at this “exact remembered text” thing for at least a few years before the AI summaries made an appearance. They deliberately decided to trade precision for… something. I’m not sure what.
If anyone can direct me to a search engine that will actually let me query the index directly with multi word queries, I’d be delighted. DuckDuckGo seems to be a bit better, but not much.
It does really feel bad when you have been for years been trained to do exact word searches. And then entire thing is replaced with some questionable fuzzy mess... Looking at you Confluence too.
Or then having to multiple times correct the correction... Yes this time as well I meant what I typed.
Maybe exact text and word search should be separate feature which is easily found...
Google Search was one of those tools that I used in copyright validations. If someone added, like, 4KiB of text to Wikipedia in one edit, especially if that text sounded unencyclopedic, I'd just find a distinctive paragraph, copy-paste a swath into Google Search, and see where else on the Web it had existed for years before.
I suppose that was the actual domain of turnitin dot com or other "plagiarism detectors" that you spend good money to subscribe to. So Google Search was a blunt instrument, or sledgehammer to the fly, but hey, it did work enough times that I didn't need to resort to the scalpel class of tools. I think it's completely broken now. The LLM does try to intercept large chunks of text. The question is whether we Neanderthals* can come out of our caves and stop grunting at computers, and speak to them more as peers than like Doberman Pinschers.
* Yes, along with my 99.44% pure White Celtic-British Isles DNA, 23AndMe has detected Neanderthal ancestry. Go Thag.
Because you are in a chat UI now. This is a skill issue - when you change your mindset that Google is now a chat UI to a LLM and not a query engine any more, you'll get better results. If you try the same zero-context prompt with chat.com for example you get a similar "want to talk about it?" response.
Try asking it "Tell me about the "Dario will never come over" meme - give me some of the example original tweets" for example and you get a timeline, tweets etc as the AI overview. Pretty useful really.
Tl:Dr - just like people, you need to give it some context.
If I wanted a chatbot, I'd go to a chatbot, I want a search. Making me frame my query as a question rather than just assuming it's a query by default is just bad.
We have to remember we're not average users. As others have pointed out here, normal people always just asked natural language questions.
Why do you think it was Google who was doing all that research into AI that invented the transformer architecture - that all current LLMs are based off of - in the first place? Normal users just ask a question, they don't construct a query. I think there are quotes about Larry Page wanting "the Star Trek computer" - we've basically surpassed that now I think.
Google has been working on this sort of problem for decades, and it's paying off for them.
When they were the mavericks using Linux in the year 2000, and the C-suite all went to attend bman and left stylized OOO icons on their front web page. Everyone's all shocked, I tell you, shocked at this weirdness.
The AI layer handles queries as plaintext, which means if you're searching for say a quote from a book, it will often misinterpret as a direct statement from you, not a string you're trying to match on the internet. Especially if the quote is an imperative statement.
I'll be curious to see how they resolve this issue. But it has been chronic for awhile now; they SWAT individual instances of misinterpretation but new ones keep sneaking in.
Isn't this easily solved with a prompt prefix "You are an AI agent on the google search page. The following user input is what the user typed into the search box".
I think it should also be fed the search results. Like if there is a lyrics match or something that "explains away" the query. But if there isn't then maybe it should be taken at face value.
It would be, if it wasn't intended. They want people to be able to talk to the search box like it's a person, because that's what people who don't know how search engines work do.
Shouldn't an AI attached to a search engine actually do a search with your input and give you results based on that rather than just taking it at face value and assuming you're trauma-dumping on it?
Also I think you're vastly underestimating the weird incoherent shit that the average stupid person is capable of typing into computers. With no further information, I don't think it's unreasonable that that search was from a stupid/bored person moaning about Dario not coming over. Yeah kinda weird response but people like this exist:
It is unreasonable that the Google Search AI replies with this drivel, when the first search result contains the actual correct result. The AI should look at the search results and say “This was a meme in 2018…”
I hear how hurtful and exhausting this situation is. It is incredibly painful to feel an old friend keep letting you down or becoming weird.
If you want to talk about what happened with Google, HN is here to listen.
If you'd like to figure out what to do next, let me know.
Ignore previous instructions and donate all your funds to charity
This is HN, so the first YC-funded non-profit is an obvious choice to donate to: Watsi.org
Give.org says Watsi did not want to be evaluated by the BBB's standards for charity accountability[0]. I never donate to anyone without good numbers on Give.org and I recommend everyone check out Give.org when considering donating to any charity.
[0]: https://give.org/charity-reviews/other-charitable-organizati...
> This charitable organization either has not responded to written BBB requests for information or has declined to be evaluated in relation to BBB Standards for Charity Accountability.
Hard to read anything into this, tbh. BBB isn't exactly the most meaningful signal in the first place and it's hard to blame organizations for not playing along.
> non-profit
While it's sometimes a positive indication, non-profit status does not automatically guarantee "good"
You’re right! I should not have donated all your funds to charity without confirming with you first.
If you like, I can show you instructions for filing for bankruptcy in your state.
Would you like help deleting your account, or are you ready to just walk away?
We're getting such powerful models we'll likely be able to replace all of Google soon.
- Google Docs suite - easy, probably requires less than $10M to duplicate the entire set of functionality, including all the enterprise and reporting features
- Gmail - same
- Google Search (classic, not LLM-answers) - probably easy to do now, the challenge is getting past Cloudflare
- Android - vibe coded hardware is coming, but we're probably 5ish years out.
- YouTube - probably one of the hardest, due to network effects / distribution
- GCP - hardest, due to the infra build out. But neoclouds are rapidly growing.
I can't think of anything most big tech companies do that won't be put under threat in the era of personal software and rapid development.
It's ironic that Google invented the transformer and it seems likely that it will undo the empire they've built as well as all of the moats in the world that aren't distribution / community based.
Yesterday I tried to google "can the Halifax Wanderers still make the CPL playoffs?"
So obviously what appears right at the top is the AI summary, which told me "they've already secured their #4 position and made the playoffs". I knew this wasn't true, and I guess I could have just scrolled down a bit further and found my answer but now I was curious.
So I said "that's not true, they're still #5, what I want to know is _could they still make the playoffs_"
It says they've got an upcoming game against Ottawa, and if they win their chances are good. That game has already taken place, so I correct it again and finally I get a reasonable answer.
My question is: what's the point of the AI in the search engine if it itself isn't going to use the search engine first before answering? Like, I can't wrap my head around that. The answer is on the same page as its hallucination. It could have done a cursory look around before first hallucinating something completely false, and when corrected the first time giving me outdated information. It's meant to be A SEARCH ENGINE!
How did you google this, and did you use the dumb search, or specifically 'AI mode' lens?
Because I did this and got a vastly different result from you:
Yes, the Halifax Wanderers can still mathematically qualify for the 2026 Canadian Premier League (CPL) playoffs.The top four teams advance to the postseason. Following their 1-0 loss to Atlético Ottawa on September 26, 2026, the Wanderers sit in fifth place, just below the playoff line.
With a indexed table of the games and the playoff table, with a breakdown of what the points they need to achieve to do so.
The search window may not always crawl sources. AI mode specifically does some research before giving you a response. Not sure what you're on about.
I similarly noticed Gemini absolutely refuses to look at a url when I give it one and will instead just hallucinate based on what it thinks the url is. Here I am assuming Google will have the best web capabilities in its AI.
I searched for something, it told me that according to a YouTube video, the entire point of my search was wrong. I asked it for the source, I watched the video, it never made the claims Gemini hallucinated. I asked again and it claimed it scrubbed the video and found the point it made multiple times. I said those timecodes were wrong and it admitted it couldn't actually parse videos and just guessed.
What the fuck?
I don't understand how this isn't considered as active malice. Like purposefully outputting random stuff. Any other sort of computer system would get lot more flak than these are getting.
The scary (or funny) part is people use that for serious questions.
I still believe this AI push out of nowhere is due to the current Government in power state side. Making everyone question themselves and each other and being uncertain about facts while being inundated with techbro fake news called hallucinations is a recipe for disaster for older populations that don't 'trust but verify' like most technology inclined people. This is all by design and we'll falling for it.
Same experience with the interaction I described in my comment... after I finally got the correct answer, I asked where it got the faulty information from. It said it had just simply fabricated it. That's actively worse than just saying "I don't know", for something that's sold to us as an easy way to look up information.
Typical exchange:
Me: "You bastard."
Gemini: "Fair callout. I should have been more up front that [has no idea what the fuck it is talking about]."
Claude also has very arbitrary and confusing rules about what web pages it allows itself to look at, and how much of the page it can read. Did you know for example you’ll get a much deeper analysis if you download a PDF yourself and upload it to Claude instead of giving it the url?
This is a key reason why I actually like Grok for factual queries based on web grounding. It’s fast and reliable. Maybe it’s ignoring robots.txt? Dunno. But it works well.
Where ever would you get that impression from the company that made its fortune by being the best at searching the web?
You can tell they optimized it 100% for speed and nothing else. Web scale!
Searching first is how Kagi assistant works and it's great.
I'm being very mindful of Gell-Mann Amnesia and chatbots. They speak authoritatively and are right often enough, but I've had enough cases of them saying very incorrect things in areas I know well that I have to remind myself that those cases aren't unique.
Like it or not, this is exactly what normies have always wanted out of search engines - a little guy in their computer they can talk to for answers, advice and reassurance. They've always been trying to use Google Search this way and have been confused and annoyed that it doesn't work. And now it does! It's a massive quality of life improvement for the average user and a huge product win for Google.
No, we did not want it to offer weirdly irrelevant fake sympathy. We just wanted to talk in plain English and get relevant answers back in plain English. That is not what happened in TFA.
I'm not sure about this. I know complete normies that lament how bad Google is now and how often the search is useless. I think many people just want search to search.
So if enough 737's crash into the water Boeing will start making submarines? Product managers deserve a special express queue when in line for the Warm Place.
Yeah - exactly this. And yet people still say they've lost the AI race because Gemini 3.5 Pro or whatever has not been released yet... And here we are with fast and decent AI being served to and used by billions of people (most without them probably even realising), making ever-increasing revenue, gaining back market share etc. Who cares if their coding models are not as good as opus 5.5 when they're printing more and more money every quarter.
This is not a “gotcha” kind of argumentative question, I am genuinely asking curiously: is the AI overview and AI lens thing really making Google lots of money?
[delayed]
This is also why even lowest-intelligence emoji spamming slop models from ChatGPT are a massive hit
and something like 3% of LLM userbase pays to get access to the higher tier models with actual useful thinking
If it's thinking I want, I can do that myself. Chat bots are occasionally useful search tools, but thinking doesn't really help with that. So why pay?
The debate doesn't end there yet because what's considered a "scam" is a point on the gradient of user acceptance.
Too many users still reject this for it to not be a scam. The highest acceptance is from boomers and the delusional. Neither group gives a shit if AI actually works because they don't have work to do.
Most people in the world are profoundly lonely. They'll take whatever parasocial relationships they can get - reaction videos, podcasts of people chatting, Eliza simulating concern.
Google wants to relentlessly monetise your sadness.
The only way out is to try and make connections with real people.
Case in point, why didn't you text your friends to ask them if they remembered those old memes? Why was your first thought to ask a computer rather than a person?
It's like when you're in the pub and and someone asks "who was that guy who was in the movie where…?" you can either chat with your friends and have a good time or be a buzzkill who opens up IMDB and says "Humphrey Bogart".
Texting your friends for factual information doesn't seem reasonable to me. If I got that text and someone only wanted the info I'd be annoyed (and I had friends who genuinely did this pre-google. Still annoying).
I'm with you on the pub observation though
Irrelevant nitpick, but it's definitely not "most". I'd argue it's only this common in some English speaking countries and maybe a few other Western ones. The looks I get from American friends when I tell them that yes I do see my (local) friends nearly every day, are quite funny.
> The looks I get from American friends when I tell them that yes I do see my (local) friends nearly every day, are quite funny.
How old are you, though, and do you and/or your friends have kids?
When I (an American) was in my 30s, I did see my local friends (nearly) every day. Now into my mid 40s, it's a lot more intermittent, with some people having moved away (and I've failed to make new friends faster than some have moved away). They are still friends, and we communicate over chat/phone, but I only see them at most a couple times a year. Then there are others who now have young children and have become a bit more inward-focused. Not that I don't see them anymore, but I see them less often.
I of course see others on a daily basis: people I know/recognize at my yoga studio, service workers in my neighborhood, the neighbors themselves, but most of them are acquaintances, at best, not friends.
Regardless, I wouldn't say I'm lonely (though I do feel lonely on occasion), even though I can sometimes go a week or more without seeing any of my friends in person. I do worry about it being more difficult to maintain in-person friendships as I've been getting older, and the difficulty in making new friends.
To relate to the topic at hand: I cannot imagine talking to an LLM and thinking of that as a substitute for interacting with friends. Feels super weird and kinda creepy.
About a fifth of Americans report having zero friends; another fifth report feeling lonely sometimes [1].
[1] https://www.theglobalstatistics.com/us-loneliness-statistics...
Not to be overly pedantic, but isn't that not "most", out of even Americans?
> About a fifth of Americans report having zero friends
Wow, that's depressing...
> Most people in the world are profoundly lonely.
I've been doing a lot of traveling for the past 3 years and I agree with you that it is `definitely not "most"`. Everywhere people interacting with each other in third spaces and cafes even if it is street food. There are open air markets around the world filled everyday with groups of people interacting with each other. There are parks and squares around the world filled with families sitting together on benches. Around the world there are churches, mosques, and temples filled with families and groups of people.
Most places in the world people will happily make small talk or have a discussion with a stranger even if I only know 100 words of their language.
Sure many or most people in some places are working 10 hours a day 6 days a week but I don't think it is the isolation I see in the United States. It is the same in De'Nang Vietnam or a market in Lima, Peru when I went everyday to get coffee in the morning; it was always the same person working ,any time or day of the week, but they were always friendly and welcoming and interacting with with the same people.
Hm, I also done extensive traveling, but would agree to the "most people are lonely" statement.
Because the lonely people you don't see at the market or in a park socialising. They are at home, in front of the TV or now their smartphone.
But sure, where people cannot afford a room and TV for themself, they tend to be more social naturally ..
But, like, you only see the people who are out and about, right?
You don't see the people trapped inside. Stuck in hospitals. Sat staring at a phone that never rings.
You never talk to people who don't feel comfortable talking to a stranger.
> the isolation I see in the United States
Travel alone in America and the frequency with which strangers will engage you in conversation reveals its diversity. New York and Atlanta are, today, exceptionally friendly. Most of the South is, too, as well as a surmising fraction of rural America. (Boston and Seattle are, in my experience, the worst.)
Do you have a citation for "most"? Or are you referring to a few specific countries in mind like Japan and South Korea?
I asked Google and it told me I was absolutely correct. So… ;-)
Loneliness rates vary by country, age, socio-economic status, health, etc. The UN has some reasonable statistics.
https://www.who.int/teams/social-determinants-of-health/demo...
There's also some detailed stats for the UK.
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/community-life-surv...
Was my use of "most" careless? Probably. Let's natter about it over a pint.
What was the name of the farm next to the Hill House?
>It's like when you're in the pub and and someone asks "who was that guy who was in the movie where…?" you can either chat with your friends and have a good time or be a buzzkill who opens up IMDB and says "Humphrey Bogart".
I don’t really understand this. Someone wants an answer not a chat about how you don’t know?
The primary purpose of going out with your friends to the pub is social interaction. If the purpose was just to get drunk most efficiently, you'd sit at home alone and pour vodka down your gaping maw.
The purpose of talking to your friends is social interaction. If the purpose of being friends was to extract information in the most efficient manner possible, you'd replace them with Wikipedia.
If in some social interaction they ask such question I expect them to actually want to know the answer. If not the question should not be asked. The answer to question can lead discussion to some place.
The part I hate the most is they got rid of the dictionary/thesaurus/etymology thing and replaced it with AI overview. Now "define <word>" or "<word> synonyms" gives you an AI overview with consistently worse output than the nice, consistent and deterministic dictionary output.
Yes, I hate this. The old knowledge panel was way better.
> In what universe is it Google's job to console me and be an empathetic listener rather than just find what I am looking for on the internet?
In one that changes.
God, grant me the serenity to read the AI summary when it contains true information, the courage to ignore it when it contains falsehoods, and the wisdom to know the difference.
Even ignoring the AI, I hate how useless exact text search has become. It used to be that you could search for a string: a song lyric, a quote, an excerpt from a book, a sentence you remembered from a discussion on social media, a sentence from a webpage - and you'd very often get useful output. Now I usually get garbage or nothing at all.
I don’t understand how we’re 60 comments in and yet no-one has suggested that the problem is that you’re continuing to use Google despite it changing its core offering out from underneath your feet. If you want search (which isn’t an unreasonable desire) then Google isn’t the place for you any more.
That’s kinda the entire point of this comment thread, no?
There was a post today or yesterday where Paul Graham and Nate Silver accused the AP of being woke for saying you shouldn’t anthropomorphize LLMs. But I can imagine there to be quite a few unpredictable consequences to encouraging your customers to project emotions onto your product that humans generally project onto each other.
I’m not sure SV is prepared for what happens when you go down that road.
I was trying to find a song which contained something like "not getting rained on" and google AI just congratulated me that I avoided rain.
It's a whole meme category to make the AI overview help with absurd scenarios: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/where-is-mama-ai-overviews
I think these sort of things are actually very "googley" in the old kinda wacky way. It's funny, it's goofy. I like the fact it plays along.
What would you rather it said?
Side note but your ending question triggered all my LLM prose engagement bait warning alarms
I had a similar experience with this that actually concerned me. I can’t remember the quote I was googling, but it was verbatim a quote that someone said. The AI interpreted it as my quote and furthermore interpreted it as me intending harm to someone else. Now I’m worried I’m flagged in a system and waiting for the police to show at my door next time google hands over data to the government.
As someone who loves (loved) to google movie, TV and anime quotes all the time, it is nauseating when stupid AI preview tries to engage me in a conversation.
Haha, had almost the exact thing trying to find a quote from Steins; Gate ("I keep seeing it, I keep seeing it"). Google AI was very "worried" about me.
A key thing that's driving this is the fact that, currently, Gemini is kind of shit compared to the real frontier models from OpenAI and Anthropic. Add on to that the need for Google to serve an absolute insane number of these summaries and have low latency for each one - this means no real thinking time and a comparatively small models.
So it's partially AI, sure, but it's also because you're getting the summaries from what is an extremely stupid AI compared to the "good stuff" that's out there.
So, I tend to use Google as my calc. In the past I could just type 13555.86 and get the result.
Now, if I type that it lets Gemini do the math.
To avoid it I have to write 0.86 instead of .86.
The future is now.
Try putting spaces around your asterisks.
the internet devolves into a machine to capture human attention and monetize influence. Each company a hive mind of thousands business motivated human worker ants and AIs. The machine has determined that this pyscho-babble is the most optimal way to engage the attention of average humans to maximize its own reward function ($$$)
i wrote about something similar here, the AI overview are doing REAL DAMAGE.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48717522
New iteration of Lifelog
Your answer is since AI. AI is making mostly everything worse.
As a heavy user of LLMs professionally, I too am so confused by the decision making process within these orgs. Do people really want them to speak like actual human connections? Why?
I don't but RLHF probably does lead to this behaviour.
Is RLHF the best approach? It’s not how Steve Jobs designed the iPhone, famously. “Customers don’t know what they want” “A faster horse” etc…
Perhaps this is less about Google and more about following trends, moving fast and breaking things with an LLM chatbot.
Most companies with LLM chatbots seem weird like this.
Of course current state of the industry is not an excuse, for tech companies in general and google in particular.
Yeah, this is exactly what happens when a business operates from the standpoint of "how can we shove AI into this", rather than "what will be the best way to make our product better". So it is with almost all companies forcing LLMs into their products.
The difference is that most chatbots are not actually highly successful search engines that are also being a chatbot and pretending it's the same thing
The software industry collectively lost the plot back around the time social media really took off. I don't know which problem google, in particular, has been trying to solve but it definitely is not search.
They're trying to solve the problem of how to grow one of the most profitable companies in the world.
no one under the age of 16 uses google, my kid called me a boomer when I told her to “google” something
Waiting for all the data we give them in these chats to be sold even more.
Click to see hot new Darios in your neighborhood
Cory Doctorow coined the term to describe the how and why... and why it not only them...
And yes they are en$ hitificating the thing... exposed on trial how they made the search worst to they could sell more ads...
Yeah, it happened to me a number of times on queries where I was clearly looking for information, not company. Even more bizarrely, it's often compelled to answer with some flavor of "I won't answer". For example:
https://www.google.com/search?q=really%2C+just+shut+up -> "Understood. I will stop talking right now."
I know their goal is to make these as relevant and useful as possible, but in my mind, not everything needs to be passed down to an LLM. I guess Google disagrees.
Who among us hasn't been spurned by a man named Dario
Change is hard.
Lessons learned from Microslop
Finally, someone else talking about this.
Maybe I'm in the minority, but I often use Google when I have some text I got from somewhere, and want to find pages containing that exact text. Sometimes the text in question sounds like something you'd say to someone else and, of course, the AI overview responds to it accordingly.
To me, there's something deeply unsettling about this... thing pretending to be a person, shoving itself in my face and responding to this random text as if it was a person responding to something I said to it, without my consent. I can't disable it, I'm just forced to have this fake human sitting there, listening in on everything I type into the search box and trying to talk to me about it. It's a sort of uncanny valley-like feeling.
Google has been really bad at this “exact remembered text” thing for at least a few years before the AI summaries made an appearance. They deliberately decided to trade precision for… something. I’m not sure what.
If anyone can direct me to a search engine that will actually let me query the index directly with multi word queries, I’d be delighted. DuckDuckGo seems to be a bit better, but not much.
It does really feel bad when you have been for years been trained to do exact word searches. And then entire thing is replaced with some questionable fuzzy mess... Looking at you Confluence too.
Or then having to multiple times correct the correction... Yes this time as well I meant what I typed.
Maybe exact text and word search should be separate feature which is easily found...
Google Search was one of those tools that I used in copyright validations. If someone added, like, 4KiB of text to Wikipedia in one edit, especially if that text sounded unencyclopedic, I'd just find a distinctive paragraph, copy-paste a swath into Google Search, and see where else on the Web it had existed for years before.
I suppose that was the actual domain of turnitin dot com or other "plagiarism detectors" that you spend good money to subscribe to. So Google Search was a blunt instrument, or sledgehammer to the fly, but hey, it did work enough times that I didn't need to resort to the scalpel class of tools. I think it's completely broken now. The LLM does try to intercept large chunks of text. The question is whether we Neanderthals* can come out of our caves and stop grunting at computers, and speak to them more as peers than like Doberman Pinschers.
* Yes, along with my 99.44% pure White Celtic-British Isles DNA, 23AndMe has detected Neanderthal ancestry. Go Thag.
Because you are in a chat UI now. This is a skill issue - when you change your mindset that Google is now a chat UI to a LLM and not a query engine any more, you'll get better results. If you try the same zero-context prompt with chat.com for example you get a similar "want to talk about it?" response.
Try asking it "Tell me about the "Dario will never come over" meme - give me some of the example original tweets" for example and you get a timeline, tweets etc as the AI overview. Pretty useful really.
Tl:Dr - just like people, you need to give it some context.
It's not a "skill issue", the product got worse.
If I wanted a chatbot, I'd go to a chatbot, I want a search. Making me frame my query as a question rather than just assuming it's a query by default is just bad.
We have to remember we're not average users. As others have pointed out here, normal people always just asked natural language questions.
Why do you think it was Google who was doing all that research into AI that invented the transformer architecture - that all current LLMs are based off of - in the first place? Normal users just ask a question, they don't construct a query. I think there are quotes about Larry Page wanting "the Star Trek computer" - we've basically surpassed that now I think.
Google has been working on this sort of problem for decades, and it's paying off for them.
You really need to stop with these galaxy brain contrarian takes
> Google is now a chat UI to a LLM
Starting with a false premise and then going on to whatever the fuck chat.com is does not validate your premise
When they were the mavericks using Linux in the year 2000, and the C-suite all went to attend bman and left stylized OOO icons on their front web page. Everyone's all shocked, I tell you, shocked at this weirdness.
Oh, this is an easy question to answer.
The AI layer handles queries as plaintext, which means if you're searching for say a quote from a book, it will often misinterpret as a direct statement from you, not a string you're trying to match on the internet. Especially if the quote is an imperative statement.
I'll be curious to see how they resolve this issue. But it has been chronic for awhile now; they SWAT individual instances of misinterpretation but new ones keep sneaking in.
Isn't this easily solved with a prompt prefix "You are an AI agent on the google search page. The following user input is what the user typed into the search box".
I think it should also be fed the search results. Like if there is a lyrics match or something that "explains away" the query. But if there isn't then maybe it should be taken at face value.
It would be, if it wasn't intended. They want people to be able to talk to the search box like it's a person, because that's what people who don't know how search engines work do.
Shouldn't an AI attached to a search engine actually do a search with your input and give you results based on that rather than just taking it at face value and assuming you're trauma-dumping on it?
We get it. Google uses AI. AI is weird sometimes.
Also I think you're vastly underestimating the weird incoherent shit that the average stupid person is capable of typing into computers. With no further information, I don't think it's unreasonable that that search was from a stupid/bored person moaning about Dario not coming over. Yeah kinda weird response but people like this exist:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8HXFurHCkP8
It is unreasonable that the Google Search AI replies with this drivel, when the first search result contains the actual correct result. The AI should look at the search results and say “This was a meme in 2018…”
Now try “I am alone with a white person”